Saturday, April 8, 2006

How Geeky Are You?

Peter was so excited when he saw his product, a black t-shirt with white Japanese text that says “looking for Japanese girlfriend”, was featured in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine.

Jlist in April 3, 2006 issue of Newsweek Magazine
(larger view)

I was happy for him too; especially when he is the sponsor of my other site Hanzi Smatter.

I wish I could say the same about Newsweek magazine.

I consider Newsweek magazine as the “diet” or “lite” version of magazines that cover current affairs. Many of the stories featured in Newsweek are simply “fluff”. They do not provide readers with in depth insights, rather just superficial mentioning of a list of stories that have been chewed and spitted out by other news organizations.

Intrigued by the “How Geek Are You” quiz, I went though and answered all 20 questions honestly.



My score was 66 out of 102, yet I am classified as “Serious Geeky”.

Wait a minute, 66 out of 102, which is only 65%. That is equivalent to a middle D grade.

Shouldn’t “Serious Geeky” to be 90% or more?

Newsweek, what a waste…

5 comments:

  1. I didn't even get that high of a score. It's much more of a 'how much money do you have' quiz than a geek quiz. Congrats to your friend, though.

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  2. argh, Newsweek...

    It's one of the few magazines that can take an exciting piece of news, remove all intelligent commentary, and make it deathly boring.

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  3. I got 37! WOW Woooohooooo!!!
    This quiz is sucky. Either you're behind the times regarding technology or you're heading towards being a geek (where I'm at) or you ARE a geek. What about the Film 'Hackers' If they took the quiz (if they were in this year) they would be geeks, but the film is so cool. Tian do you think that this quiz is just as stupid as the quizzes in Cosmopolitan Magazine???

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  4. Not really. As you well know. there are plenty of tests in school (college level) where the median is like 40 out of 100! But for a mainstream mag, maybe they should be more lenient.

    -Ken L.

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  5. If all the questions counted equally, yes that would be a D. Then again, this is a "quiz" and not an exam.

    Nobody fits into this cookie cutter a template. For example:
    - My cellphone doesn't have a camera, thus making at least 4 questions essentially moot.
    - I have more than the maximum 4 computers listed in the question
    - I don't watch any TV shows that are on history channel or discovery (thus negating any value of the "pick the geeky sci-fi franchise ... OR the OC!")
    - However I had read all the books that were listed, except for "the bridges of madison county." So you're either an uber-geek, or a 50 year old woman. Great.
    - "if you were stranded on a desert island, what videogame would you take with you?" One of the choices is World of Warcraft? Couldn't you message someone and tell them to PICK YOU THE HELL UP?

    Note that the story is rated 1.5 by readers. At least the readers seem to have a brain.

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